On bookselling
My grandfather, father and uncles worked in their business for three-quarters of a century, and looking back on their labours, I cannot help feeling how hollow and doctrinaire is the present ill-judged and ill-founded agitation on the iniquity of making a profit. The heaping up of gain was not their chief motive. They rejoiced in their work, and it wat surely nothing but fitting that it should yield them a modest return. There is no antagonism between profit motive and service motive.
In the case of books, and probably of most other articles, the making of profit is the supreme criterion; it is the acid test. If you don't sell your goods and make your profit, the public has weighed you in the balance, you are found wanting... The publisher's chief preoccupation is to try to meet the public's taste; he can stimulate it and lead it, but fly in its face means to make a severe loss. This is a very wholesome discipline and it is a definite form of the dictatorship of the people.
From: H. Bolitho, A Batsford Century, 1943.
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